HPE supercomputer enhances weather predictions for Meteorological Service Singapore

Supercomputers continue to produce amazing results for use cases around the world. With the demand for greater and faster compute increasing, more organizations and even government agencies are looking to invest in supercomputers.

In Singapore, supercomputers are starting to play an increasingly important role in research and development. Last year, the government announced plans to build the third national supercomputer to advance research in COVID-19 and other areas of healthcare.

Apart from healthcare, Singapore’s meteorological agency is also leveraging supercomputers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has built a new supercomputer for the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) to advance weather forecasting and tropical climate research for Singapore and the broader Southeast Asia region. The new supercomputer replaces MSS’ existing system, delivering nearly twice as much performance and advanced capabilities across compute, storage, software, and networking.

The Southeast Asian region continues to experience new weather patterns which have been caused by changes to the environment and global warming. As such, this has made climate modeling become increasingly complex and now requires faster, more sophisticated supercomputing capabilities. HPE’s supercomputing solutions accelerate weather forecasting across the globe to provide real-time analysis by delivering significant computational performance and end-to-end capabilities to model and simulate climate data.

The new supercomputer will enable the agency to increase forecast skills through improved numerical model configurations and advanced data assimilation of ground-and space-based weather observations  in MSS’ numerical weather prediction system called ‘SINGV’. SINGV was developed by MSS’ Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) through collaborations with UK Met Office and partners and configured specifically for weather forecasts and climate applications in Singapore and the nearby region.

Additionally, the supercomputer will enable the use of modern forecast postprocessing algorithms, using machine learning techniques, to improve the quality of forecasts. The enhanced computational power will also allow the further development of the following high-resolution models to deliver improved weather and climate products. This includes:

• Sub-kilometer scale urban modeling (uSINGV), which is being developed to represent the urban environment more appropriately in weather and climate applications
• Coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-wave modeling system (cSINGV) to capture and improve the understanding of the strong feedbacks between the atmosphere, land, and ocean, which have a significant impact on the weather and climate over the Southeast Asia region

According to Trish Damkroger, Chief Product Officer and senior vice president of HPC, AI, & Labs at HPE, Singapore continues to drive its national initiatives with supercomputing projects that significantly contribute to science, accelerate innovation and improve a range of areas for the greater good of its citizens.

The MSS, which is part of Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA), is dedicated to providing the nation with timely weather forecasts, insights into Singapore’s tropical climate, and a better understanding of event patterns in monsoons, heatwaves, and air pollution. To advance MSS’ mission, the new supercomputer, which will be built using the HPE Cray supercomputer to deliver powerful, end-to-end performance and capabilities, will improve modeling and simulation of complex weather data to provide more accurate, real-time weather forecasts and warnings to citizens.

“At CCRS, our scientists and software engineers are committed to developing advanced modeling systems and examining complex data to provide timely weather forecasts for our nation, which due to the island’s unique geological positioning, often experiences various weather processes on a daily basis,” commented Prof. Dale Barker, Director (CCRS).

Prof. Baker also mentioned that after collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to design the new supercomputer, their research center will gain a faster system with next-generation technologies to advance modeling and simulation tools, while introducing new capabilities to test and apply future types of applications for deeper research methodologies.

MSS is gaining nearly 2X more performance, with a peak performance of 401.4 teraflops, using a set of new technologies spanning compute, networking, storage, and software. The new system will also continue to use Altair® PBS Professional, one of the industry’s leading job scheduling and workload manager solutions to efficiently scale and optimize various modeling, simulation, and AI workloads.

The supercomputer is hosted at the CCRS’s Data Centre.

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